1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to monitoring production status in manufacturing Fabs and, more particularly, to allowing customers to remotely define their own alerts and conditions for production status using a Web page and receiving automatic alerts.
2. Description of Related Art
The manufacturing environment creates product directly from a customer design with customers often needing to do special operations when certain engineering or production lots are moved to particular stages. An example of this would be a pilot lot being tested that might require a more complicated procedure by the customer at a certain point.
In the manufacture of semiconductor chips and wafers, the effect of this customer intervention can add an enormous cost to the production. The development of communication systems in which the customer can stay in contact with the manufacturing Fab engineers while staying at their home site has cut down on the tremendous cost of having the customer's development engineers on site to continually monitor production status. There are, however, still problems.
Currently a customer can log onto a Web site to check the Work in Progress (WIP) status of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), but this needs to be done frequently as the status can change very quickly. Much time and manpower is required to make this work effectively. Even if the customer were to ask manufacturing employees to notify them of production status, there would still be costly time and manpower involved and a possible delay in getting the information which could hold up production. Improvements to this method and system are still needed for maximum efficiency, and this invention offers that.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,408,220 (Nulman) discusses semiconductor processing techniques in manufacturing. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,397,116 (Matsumoto) a production control system and method is discussed. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,259,956 (Myers et al.) a method and apparatus for site management of unattended robots storage and dispensing sites.